I am the co-founder and CEO of Zenger Folkman, a strengths-based leadership development firm that created a methodology that enables leaders to move faster and higher. My work with my colleagues at Zenger Folkman has led to statistically significant improvements in how leaders lead, how their employees engage and how their companies profit; allowing both leaders and organizations to soar to new heights.
I am considered a world expert in the field of leadership development, and am a highly respected and sought after speaker, consultant and executive coach. I have authored or co-authored over a hundred articles on leadership, productivity, learning, training and measurement. I am the best-selling author or co-author of 12 books, including How To Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths , The Extraordinary Leader, Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders (McGraw-Hill, 2002), The Inspiring Leader: Unlocking the Secrets of How Extraordinary Leaders Motivate, command The Extraordinary Coach: How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow, and Results-Based Leadership, (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) voted by SHRM as the Best Business Book in the year 2000, Not just for CEO's – Sure-Fire Success Secrets for the Leader in Each of Us (Irwin Professional Publishing, 1996); and Making 2 + 2 = 5: 22 Action Steps to Boost Productivity (Irwin, 1997). I am a co-author of three books on teams, including the best-selling, Self-Directed Work Teams: The New American Challenge
In 2011 I was given the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Training and Development, their highest recognition for contributions to the workforce learning and development profession.

Is What We Need From Leaders Prewired Into Our Brains?

We use different parts of our brain to respond to different varieties of feedback.

As much as we all enjoy the sound of birds chirping, sometimes they can be a nuisance. Their droppings on outdoor furniture cushions are aggravating and time-consuming to clean up. One solution our family discovered is to place several fake snakes in areas you don’t want the birds to visit. The mechanism that creates a bird’s aversion to snakes is a bit mysterious to me. I somehow can’t imagine this happens by lectures from parent birds to the chicks. A bird’s brain is apparently prewired with an understanding that snakes are an enemy to be avoided. Fortunately it applies to all the bird species that make our yard their home.

I have recently come to believe that the fundamental rules of successful interpersonal relationships are hardwired into our brains in much the same fashion. Behaviors that we have assumed were learned through nurturing and social interaction may have at their core something that is programmed into the brain.

The brain seems organized around the basic processes of minimizing threat and maximizing reward. Neuroscientists have concluded that the brain networks that are used for basic survival are the same ones that insure that we can breathe air and that we have food and water. The limbic system of the brain identifies in 1/5 of a second something that is a threat, and threats always take priority over rewards. These blindingly fast decisions occur in the limbic system and happen long before the more conscious part of the brain processes the data and reaches a conclusion. The Nobel prize winning psychologist describes this phenomenon in his New York Times bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow, and labels them System I and System II.

If you were asked to compile a list of some basic rules for effective human interactions and what people who work in an organization want from a leader, chances are the list would include things like:

1. Treat people with respect and dignity

2. Make people feel included rather than excluded from a work team or group

3. Provide others with positive, reinforcing feedback

4. Refrain from making negative or demeaning comments

5. Act in a predictable way so that people are not constantly guessing about what is appropriate behavior around you, or how you will make decisions

6. As much as possible, allow individuals to make their own decisions, especially about how things will be accomplished

7. Create strong, warm bonds with others in order for people to perform at their best, and avoid cold and distant behavior

8. Treat people equitably, never playing favorites with some in contrast to others

(Oh, by the way, those same behaviors worked best with my children as they grew up.)

These behaviors seem virtually universal across cultures, as well as business and public sector organizations. Gender and age differences do not alter this list. That all causes me to believe even more in the argument that these may be largely pre-wired into us and not merely learned in some haphazard way.

An Australian, David Rock, has proposed a useful way of looking at human needs and how they relate to fundamental brain functioning. The five needs he identifies are:

Status

Certainty

Autonomy

Relatedness

Fairness

Other driving motivations might include mastery of one’s work, or being engaged with a cause that provides us with a strong sense of purpose. The idea is simply this. Each of these fundamental needs or motivations activate the brain making an interpretation of events that happen to us. Positive recognition from a boss elevates the subordinate’s feelings of having status, provides them with assurance and certainty, improves their sense of relatedness to the boss and assures them that the boss recognizes their efforts. In this state, the person learns. They also see numerous alternatives by which to solve current problems or challenges. The brain is working at its peak.

On the other hand, if the boss criticizes a subordinate’s work, this is immediately seen as a threat. Virtually all of the above needs get threatened. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness each get diminished. This is reflexive and virtually an unconscious response; just as if a menacing snake had slithered into the office. This threat reduces the supply of oxygen and glucose in the prefrontal cortex, which in turn reduces the subordinate’s ability to produce good answers and reduces any creative thought processes. Subtle signals invariably get missed. The amygdala is activated and higher order thought processes are circumvented. Learning is diminished.

The neural networks that are used when working with friends are those that are used more commonly and frequently; whereas working with strangers forces an individual to use entirely different neural networks. This explains, in part, the discomfort we feel when working with strangers and our propensity to turn to old friends.

It is easy for a new, well-intentioned manager to inadvertently run afoul of the hard-wired human brain. In the name of maintaining professional distance (an old military concept) the manager may violate the human need for warmth and closeness. By being too eager to meet a target or deadline the inexperienced manager does not allow a subordinate the autonomy that the human brain needs.

When you travel the globe you are impressed by how similar people are in their wants and psychological needs. Maybe its genetics that explains it all.

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I’m asking because many people don’t mind when their boss is “playing favourites”. Actually, this is how some of them get promoted.

Also, including people and showing the respect is the same thing, in my opinion. But there are people who couldn’t care less if they are included or not. I worked with people who told me “I just need to know how to do my job so I can leave at 5 PM. I don’t care about anything else.”

As for feedback, it has to be both positive and negative to be constructive. If you don’t tell people that they’re wrong or that they made a mistake, you’re not a very good leader and you’re not helping them.

These people are not incompetent or lazy, they may be demotivated, unhappy, suffering, etc. True leaders need to know how to work with imperfect people.

Questions, you are correct about true leaders knowing how to work with imperfect people. And you may also enjoy my recent article on the balance of feedback – you are correct that both positive and negative feedback are required, but our research shows that striking the ideal balance is key. Neither leaders nor the people they lead are perfect OR ideal – thus the need for companies to put a solid focus on leadership development. Thanks very much for your note. Regards, Jack

It would appear that the human brain is hardwired to react in certain ways to particular inputs; however, how each human reacts is what matters to the leader. All birds don’t react the same way to snakes (the Roadrunner here in New Mexico will attack a rattlesnake) and all people will not react in the same way to the behaviors you list.

Leaders must not only know good leadership techniques, but also how to apply them to individual people. Likewise, the needs identified by Rock are seen differently by different people and especially generations. For instance, fairness is a very different concept today than it was 50 years ago. Therefore, an older worker will see a leader’s attempt to treat everyone “equally” as inherently unfair while a younger worker will see that attempt as appropriate.

Needs and reaction to needs tend to change over time as well. For instance, what Maslow identified as a survival need is quite different than what many of the younger generation now see as a survival need.